Manon

In the days of the Liberation a resistance fighter saves Manon, a village girl about to be lynched for having consorted with Germans. The two flee to Paris. Robert loves her; Manon says she cannot live without money and takes the work her brother arranges. Robert takes her back each time and falls further each time. The subject is not love but the complete dissolution of morality after the war. Nobody in the film is good: the black market, prostitution, denunciation and blackmail are all shown as ordinary business. Even Robert's fidelity is drawn as a kind of compulsion. The form is realist and merciless. Henri-Georges Clouzot shows a lightless, crowded Paris; the final section moves somewhere else entirely, into a long march across desert inside a column of migrants. The source is Abbé Prévost's eighteenth-century novel Manon Lescaut. Clouzot carries the story into his own period and places the ending among Jewish migrants trying to reach Palestine, which in 1949 put the film directly inside current politics. It won the Golden Lion at Venice. Cécile Aubry plays Manon and Michel Auclair plays Robert. Who it is for: viewers who like post-war French cinema and bleak love stories. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a sympathetic character; nobody here is saved.